The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  With all these thoughts settling themselves in his mind he now strode with as much dignity and self-possession down the slope as he had done a few minutes earlier up the slope, and even Albertus himself couldn’t resist observing with a sort of humorous self-derogatory admiration, that was almost like the feeling of a rival athlete, the way Bonaventura managed his feet and his steps under that grey robe as he descended, calling aloud in authoritative tones to Spardo, and, when at Cheiron’s side, hesitating not a second to mount the animal, an effort which he carried through with dignified ease and even with a certain grace.

  Spardo himself, it must be confessed, was not greatly pleased by being taken possession of in this wholesale manner. Even if his employment by Bonaventura turned out well as a matter of business, he was not the son of his father for nothing. There was something ignoble in forsaking this tragic drama at the crucial point. But what was the alternative?

  Cheiron was responding with interest to the way Bonaventura managed the reins; and the best thing he himself could do now was to make an exit worthy of leaving Lost Towers to its fate. And a dramatic exit he did manage to make. He suddenly seized, as he followed Cheiron and Cheiron’s stately rider, one of the massive pikestaves, which were really very dangerous weapons, carried by the King’s Men.

  The person whose weapon Spardo seized naturally refused to relinquish it, until Perspicax himself, who was only a few paces away and who wasn’t at all anxious to start trouble, gave the man a nod to let him have the thing. Once in his possession none of the King’s Men, nor any member of any conceivable body-guard of royal persons, could have handled this weapon, in which the piercingness of a spear is mingled in such appalling unity with the cleavingness of an axe, more professionally than Spardo.

  “Bastard I may be,” every swing and sweep of his feather-like beard seemed to chant to the hairy flanks of Cheiron and the flapping skirts of Bonaventura, “Bastard I may be, but my father was a King! Where is there a King here, among these petty baronies and manories and flanories? Kings of Bohemia are Kings indeed; and, as the song says, ‘the heart of the laurel is in its seed’; but these scrabblement codfish blown in from the sea haven’t got a King nearer than London; and the one they’ve got is a dying one, ‘fed upon pap and sleeping on sap’, as the song says.”

  To feel this terrific weapon in his hand, and to feel that with it he could destroy anyone he wished at any moment, gave Spardo such lively satisfaction that it reconciled him to following his horse and its stately rider, even though it meant his own departure from this memorable scene; but by keeping a firm hold with his free hand on the back of Cheiron’s saddle he considerably reduced the pace of their retirement.

  After using all his own magnetic will-power in addition to all the magnetism in his precious lodestone, to bring everybody to this particular spot, Petrus Peregrinus was beginning to find that it was easier to bring people together than to manage them when they were brought. Here certainly they all were!

  But he knew only too well, as pressing “Little Pretty’s” oblong cranium harder and harder against himself, he awaited the next move of chance or providence, that his own future was anything but assured.

  Suddenly he became aware that, not only was the black-robed form of Albertus Magnus approaching him, but that the gigantic figure of Peleg, carrying the Brazen Head itself on his shoulder, with Ghosta at his side with one arm raised to help in supporting the thing’s weight, was also, yard by yard, slowly ascending the slope.

  What unluckily nobody had seen—or luckily perhaps, for who can tell from what horrors to be safely dead may save any of us—was that by the force of his scientific magnetism Petrus had drawn Heber Sygerius, the old ex-bailiff himself, out of Sir Mort’s “Little Room”, and dragged him all through the forest, and not by the easiest route either, till he sank absolutely exhausted, just where this particular trail ended, at the foot of the Lost Towers slope.

  Old Heber knew exactly where he was; and the odd thing was that, though totally exhausted and unable to advance another step, he felt, as he stretched himself out on the warm, dead, dry, brown pine-needles, and allowed his whole body to relax and his whole being to sink down and down and down and down into a deep delicious bed of submission to the need for everlasting rest, a wave of greater happiness than he had ever known in all his long life.

  It may well be that what gives to the wind along that Wessex coast its indescribable mixture of vague sorrow and wild obscure joy comes from its passing, on its unpredictable path, the floating hair of so many love-lorn maidens and the wild-tossed beards of so many desolate old men.

  As it blew now across those forests and those swamps, it might have been suspected of taking a goblinish delight in switching and twitching and bewitching the crazy wisps that fluttered this way and that from Spardo’s chin. Was its long-drawn wail made deeper, was its wild exultation made shriller, when it became the choric accompaniment to Spardo’s careless killing of the one man in all that place who had prayed morning by morning and night by night for years that he might perish by just such a stroke and cross Acheron while he slept? For with the weapon he had snatched the Bohemian Bastard beheaded old Heber.

  It must have been his awareness of the black-robed teacher from Cologne advancing so rapidly up the slope behind him that made Peter Peregrinus start running towards Lilith, as she stood defying all possible universes with her slender girlish back to the open doors of the absolutely empty and deserted Lost Towers. When he was just beneath her and only a foot or so below her, he gazed passionately at her face. He not only felt an over-mastering longing to possess her, but a longing to possess her in complete solitude. And where could he find such solitude if not within the mysterious castle before him, at whose entrance she stood?

  But as he gazed at her he saw to his dismay that there had come into her face a look of horror at him and of loathing of him and of contempt for him, such as he had never seen upon anyone’s face before.

  “All the same for that”, as Homer puts it when he deals with these crises in human affairs, Petrus moved towards her. What drove him, what actuated him was clear enough. The difficult question for any chronicler to decide is the question as to whence within the almost closed circle of this strange man’s consciousness he drew the strength, the energy, the spirit, to enable him to risk all, in this almost heroic manner? For that he was risking all was a truth he felt in himself, and of which he had not the slightest doubt.

  And yet, cold-blooded, calculating, unscrupulous egoist as he was, he could not have been blind to the fact that there was no reason in the ordinary natural course of events why anyone, who so far had derived all sorts of thrilling feelings from being alone in life and being absolutely impervious to everything save his own private, uncommitted responses to life, should run a risk of this magnitude. Yes, from what region, or channel, or nerve in his being, did he derive the courage to take such a chance? Is it perhaps that in the lives of all human beings there come moments when some particular desire—in Peregrinus’s case just now, what we call “the passion of love”—drives such a sharp wedge into the rocky substance of our animal nature that it goes clean through it, leaving a slit or crevice or crack in the mysterious thing that Grosseteste taught Roger Bacon to analyse very carefully, the thing which the theologians declared to be the vegetative soul of the foetus developing a nutritive soul, which is thus laid open for “Something”, we can call it a rational soul, to enter from the limitless Outside when the infant is born.

  Yes, he was risking his all and he knew it. And yet with this strength that came to him from somewhere outside himself, perhaps from the great “Outside” of all our planetary struggles, he still went forward, pressing the lodestone desperately against the fork of his body and repeating hoarsely in the depths of his being: “I am Antichrist! I am Antichrist!”

  Lilith retreated till she was in the space between the two big doors; then seizing them both with outstretched arms, she tried to shut herself inside. But she
was too late; and it was together, and with a combined effort, that they finally got the great doors shut and barred, leaving only their dark woodwork in the centre of that vast structure of stone as the target for all that crowd of onlookers.

  Only one of the numerous people, whom the demonic power in Peter of Maricourt’s lodestone had succeeded in gathering before those closed gates, gave any thought at that moment to what was happening behind those closed doors, and that one was Roger Bacon.

  “It is like what went on,” he told himself, “between the Devil and the first wife of Adam; the very same devil who a little later was present at the creation of Eve. If I weren’t so tired I’d work out a clear map of these zodiacal revolutions in Time and Space.”

  It was indeed only natural that our Friar felt “tired” as he had not been out of his prison-chamber for more than a year. But he felt in good spirits and extremely interested in all he saw. So he seated himself on the mossy root of the oldest oak-tree in sight, a tree that might well have been an offshoot of the yet older one on which the bird rested who first brought to Britain the news of the death of Jesus; and from this secure position, as he contemplated the crowd and watched his own creation, the Brazen Head, balanced on the shoulder of Peleg and supported by what Homer would have called the “leukolenian” arm of the stately Ghosta, he allowed his mind to drift in a mood of fascinated wonder over the long eddies and aberrations of mankind’s historic pilgrimage down the ages, pondering upon its pathetic, humorous, and tragical struggles with itself, with Nature, and with the innumerable false prophets and false gods who from the beginning have led us all astray.

  But as he rested under that oak, half-awake and half-asleep and unusually happy, he suddenly became aware, by no very unnatural thought-transference, of the laboured approach to his side of none other than Lay-Brother Tuck from the Priory. The most hostile historian could have caught nothing but friendly amusement in the tone wherein this anticipator of all mankind’s wildest inventions replied to this interruption when he heard himself greeted by Brother Tuck.

  “Sit down, Brother,” was all the Friar said. “So you’ve come for me, have you? Well, well! We shan’t have any trouble except in our own legs as we go back. O no! I haven’t the faintest intention of leaving my room in the Priory, my ‘Prison’ some call it, but you and I know better! We know how little I regard it as anything like that! What did I become a Friar for? Wasn’t it for a quiet study to work in? You know that, Tuck old friend, as well as I do! Nobody but you, Tuck old rogue—Here! Sit you down here! You must be fairly done in after all that distance!—nobody but you knows what racy stories go round in our rollicking Bumset!

  “Yes, and nobody but I know what a patient listener you are, my dear, to my irreverent gossip about the so-called ‘makers of history’, whose crazy ideas I have to describe to the Holy Father to prove I’m not idling away my time.

  “Just look at all these people, Tuck! Just look at them! Do you know what got them here? I can’t tell you exactly; but I can tell you this much. It has to do with a discovery in magnetism by this acquaintance of mine—I hesitate to call him a friend, as, to confess the truth, I’m rather scared of him and a bit nervous—I always have been since I first encountered the man somewhere abroad—I don’t think it was in Paris—a bit nervous—you know how cowardly I am, Tuck old friend!—that he might start his magnetic experiments on me!

  “But let him go. And by God, he has gone! He’s behind those barred gates now, practising on young Mistress Lilith, who’s just watched her parents murder each other, and seen all their people and all their serfs bolt after a speech by Dod Pole! Yes, that Lilith-girl watched her father and mother fight to the death; and then saw all her people, both bond and free, strip off their clothes and rush away into the woods and marshes!

  “Old Dod Pole made one of those orations of his that everyone’s been telling me about. And do you know, Tuck my friend, the old boy struck some note in my midriff that brought back to my mind a scene at Montacute when—but what on earth is that Dominican from Cologne, and a demi-semi bishop he is, too, preaching about now up there? Can you catch what he’s saying?”

  It was clear enough that Brother Tuck had caught very distinctly one point anyway in the Dominican’s speech: “Well! I never thought I’d live to hear——” he now cried out.

  Roger Bacon turned to him with the most lively interest. “Hear what? For God’s sake, old friend, stop chuckling like an enamoured goblin and tell me what the fellow’s saying! You’ve had lots of foreigners in your kitchen and ought to know their accent by now! My long walk to this confounded place and this wild wind and the whistling of those King’s Men seem to have made me stone deaf.”

  Lay-Brother Tuck rose on his toes, for the angel who presided at his birth had decreed that, if he was to be the merriest of the sons of his mother, he must consent to be the shortest. He also seized a branch of the oak above the Friar’s head and hoisted himself up a little, placing a screen of leaves between Roger Bacon and the astonishing spectacle before him.

  But the Friar had trained himself too long to accept such crampings of vision to fall into a rage because he now couldn’t see this black-robed figure at the gate of Lost Towers any better than he could hear him.

  “He’s got a thing on his head,” announced Brother Tuck, “more like a turban than a mitre.”

  “Never mind what he’s got on his head, Tuck. Tell me, for Jesus’s sake, what the fellow’s saying.”

  “He’s offering to marry anybody who wants to be married.”

  “Nonsense, Tuck! Nonsense! No priest of our time, even if he were Archbishop of Ireland, would stand on a hill before the gates of Hell and offer marriage to the world!”

  “But he is, he is! I tell you, Friar, he is! He’s saying that the great evil of our time is that people don’t marry early enough!”

  “Not early enough, Tuck! God in Heaven! Haven’t I been trying all my life to stop this curst habit of marrying little girls of twelve to old men of sixty? Not early enough! What will these doctors of theology want to do next? Marry babies to each other? Marry foetuses in separate wombs, on the chance that they turn out of opposite sexes?

  “The truth must be that we monks and nuns and friars are finding our celibate life so indescribably tedious that we want to increase the number of these kicking, scratching, biting, beating, strangling couples, in order that we can at least feel thankful we’re free from the claws of a mate! But shall we never see, O my turtle-dove of Tucks, that it’s our mania for marriage itself that’s spoiling our world? Nature can provide us with loyal and faithful mates without our having formally to create such monstrosities of scratching and clawing.”

  Friar Roger continued for several minutes this diatribe against marriage; but Lay-Brother Tuck was by this time far too fascinated by what was going on to pay his metaphysical friend any further attention.

  Roger Bacon’s own mind, however, was itself soon wandering from the problem of marriage. It was of astrology he was thinking now as he stared heavenward above the left buttock of Brother Tuck and through an impenetrable mass of oak-leaves. Thus it was not the mid-day sunshine beating down on the black robes and elaborate head-dress of the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas that the inventor of the Brazen Head was now beholding, but the black abysses of the star-sprinkled midnight sky wherein he saw, although many of them would in reality when midnight came have been totally invisible, all the stars that were important as signs of the zodiac.

  But something in the whole atmosphere of this particular spot on the earth’s surface at this particular moment soon forced our great scientist’s mind back upon the religious creed which from childhood he had been taught to take for granted.

  He shut his eyes to both the blue sun-bright sky of reality and the black starlit sky of his imagination and began murmuring to himself:

  “Dicit ut audiat vocem Domini et vocem angelorum et videat angelos transfiguratos—He says that he heard the voice of the Lord and the voice
of angels and that he saw transfigured angels.

  “Christo vero habuit divinum testimonium, quod testimonium Deus Pater fecit ei—Christ truly had a divine testimony, namely the testimony which God the Father himself made on his behalf.

  “Hic est Filius Meus dilectus in quo mihti complacuit. This is my Beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.”

  Had some observant passer-by, endowed, let us suppose, with the power of reading a person’s thoughts, caught the drift of the Friar’s murmured words, he might well have been astonished that so great a scientist, whose inventions were beginning to be the wonder of the whole intellectual world, should be muttering at a crisis like this sentences that were involved in the very foundation of the Christian faith. The truth was that Roger Bacon had taken Aristotle for granted with one side of his nature, and the New Testament equally for granted with the other side of his nature, and had never, as Albertus of Cologne did, brought them into logical opposition to each other and into logical relation with each other.

  But, after all, Friar Roger’s ways are the ways of Nature herself in regard to these abysmal matters. Out of the confusion which she seems to prefer to any orderly workshop, Nature seems anxious to thicken out the drama she has inaugurated by creating ironic commentaries upon her own doings, whose choruses are not so much the expression of approval or disapproval as of humorous recognition, and produce the effect of a faint orchestral accompaniment, an accompaniment that reaches us from extremely far away and possibly from a sphere totally different from our own.

  If Friar Bacon had not been so absorbed in his interior vision of the signs of the zodiac and of the relation between Mercurius and Virgo and in the agitating conclusion he had reached—for to him by far the most interesting aspect of astronomy was astrology—about the perilous influence of our earthly satellite, the Moon—“Luna significat super-nigro-manciam et mendacium—The moon is significant of higher black magic and trickery”—he would have doubtless had some striking commentary to make upon what was now going on in front of those closed gates of Lost Towers.